Buffy's back! Well, kind of. Buffy The Vampire Slayer-creator Joss Whedon just launched a new Buffy comic series at Dark Horse that picks up where the series left off. It's a virtual eighth season, beginning with an arc written by Whedon himself to be carried on by ace writer Brian K. Vaughan. The first issue's familiar enough to make fans miss the series but compelling enough on its own terms to fill the void… A-
Those who aren't familiar with the high formalism and quaint patois of Stephen King's seven-novel Dark Tower series may be thrown by the stiffly artificial language in Peter David's partial adaptation; The Gunslinger (Marvel) runs awfully heavy on the "thankee sai"s and "do ya kennit"s, not to mention the storyteller-style commands aimed directly through the fourth wall at the reader. But Jae Lee and Richard Isanove's art is marvelous. Issue #1 starts with The Gunslinger, the first in King's seven-book series; issue #2 segues neatly into the extended flashback of book four, Wizard And Glass, as young gunslinger Roland Deschain passes his manhood trial and heads east for a fateful meeting with a girl named Susan Delgado. By necessity, with only seven issues planned, it's a relatively shallow take on a deep series, but it's an evocative one… A-
Virtually any criticism that could be made about the newly collected eight-issue series The World Below (Dark Horse) is covered in the introduction, where writer-artist Paul Chadwick fully owns up to its failings: The dialogue in the opening issues is almost comically terse, the stories are bumpy, the end is deeply depressing. But by getting those admissions out of the way up front, Chadwick frees readers to enjoy all the plusses of his psychedelic science-fiction stories, in which six privately funded explorers seek exploitable resources in a secret underground world. Heavily inspired by classic comics in the Weird Science mold, Chadwick brings the densely detailed, impeccably clean art and boundless imagination of his signature series Concrete to stories about titanic monsters, mutant societies, and living machines… B+
Following up on 2004's excellent Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot To Print, editor David Wallis assembles editorial cartoons that didn't make their respective publication's cut in Killed Cartoons: Casualties From The War On Free Expression (Norton). Coming in the wake of the Danish cartoon controversy, the time is right for a book like this, weighing the danger that lines on paper hold to the powers that be; and Wallis even gives space to cartoonists and editors who believe there should be limits on what makes it onto an editorial page. Killed Cartoons' organization is a little off, with the mini-essays about each cartoon inexplicably placed before the cartoon in question, effectively draining the immediate impact. But those essays, collective, make for a sobering portrait of how the threshold of editorial tolerance keeps moving back and forth. Example: In 1980, Mel Odom had a relatively innocuous drawing of Ronald Reagan rejected. The reason? "Not paternal enough"… B+
Captain Marvel is one of those superheroes that modern comics writers often don't know how to handle, since his original incarnation—written by Bill Parker and drawn by C.C. Beck—was much lighter and sillier than anything on the racks today. When DC Comics revived the character in the early '70s, the creative team (including Beck) held to the original idea, telling way-out stories about the unlikely collaboration between boy newsman Billy Batson and the super-powered mystical spirit who takes over for him when trouble calls. The delightfully qurky adventures in Showcase Presents: Shazam! (DC) were throwbacks even when they were first published, more suited to Little Lulu than a standard-issue muscle-bound galoot. Outside of maybe the silver-age Superman, what hero could maintain his dignity while eating mounds of runaway Jell-O, as Captain Marvel does in "The World's Mightiest Dessert?" Silly, yes. But fun… B+
In figuring out how to update Captain Marvel without losing his retro charm, no one has an edge on Jeff Smith, whose miniseries Shazam!: The Monster Society Of Evil (DC) features all the talking alligators and put-upon wizards that made the original Captain Marvel stories such a kick, while still reading like something produced in 2007. Bringing the same thick lines and animated expression that he brought to his own Bone series, Smith recasts the Captain Marvel origin story in a kid-friendly sci-fi/fantasy vein, making boy hero Billy Batson into an urchin on the verge of becoming another Harry Potter. Slick, bright, emotional and witty, The Monster Society Of Evil is everything superhero comics should be… A
When the headlines blared "Captain America Killed" you could almost hear a nation of longtime comics readers chortling. It won't last, of course. But even though it's obviously a gimmick, it's a pretty good example of how Marvel's kept its universe lively after the anti-climactic end of its Civil War miniseries. Brian Michael Bendis, for instance, debuted The Mighty Avengers, a new series drawn by Frank Cho. Comprised of a team with the war's government-sanctioned winners with the intriguing suggestion that team leader Tony Stark might not have been such a government stooge all along. Elsewhere, writer Dwayne McDuffie, late of the Justice League Unlimited animated series, shakes up The Fantastic Four by changing the team line-up and Reed Richards own reasons for siding with stark in the war… Both: B+
Noir-addled cartoonist Richard Sala is so prolific that it's easy to take him for granted, but like Norwegian genius Jason, Sala's slim graphic novels are never less than entertaining, and frequently rich. The Grave Robber's Daughter (Fantagraphics) brings back Sala's foul-mouthed teen detective Judy Drood, and traps her in a nightmarish circus town where the creepy goings-on work as metaphor for growing up and generations in transition. The story's a little one-note, but at 90 pages, it doesn't have room to get tiresome, and Sala's distinctively gothic style is still a pleasure to scan… B+
Fantagraphics has repackaged Los Bros. Hernandez's classic Love And Rockets comics about a dozen different ways, including the massive hardcover collections Palomar and Maggie & Hopey. The latest softcover anthologies, Heartbreak Soup and Maggie The Mechanic, may be the most user-friendly, bringing a plethora of the series' earliest stories to new readers in low-priced, easy-to-read packages. Of the two, Gilbert Hernandez's Heartbreak Soup is best-served, since the stories collected here are self-contained, poignant gems—some of the best work the medium has ever produced. Jaime Hernandez's lovely but weird Maggie The Mechanic comes from the days when L&R still had a sci-fi component, and it might've been better to have ended this particular volume a little earlier, before the more naturalistic "Hoppers 13" stories that occupy the last 40 pages or so. Still, if Fantagraphics continues in this format, then the next Jaime book should be a killer… A, A-